Scholar

Why does it matter if they are human or not? We could have a class of humans we don't care about that we breed and dehumanize, like we do with animals. That's all animals, because all of them are slaves whose children are stolen. Why do you kill more than you need to? If you kill an animal, you kill the animal and all the plants that had to die to feed it. If you only eat plants, you will kill no animal, and far less plants than the animal would have eaten, to get the same nutrients.

It's not only abusers who must increase their compassion. No, they eat what we feed them. You are attempting to relativize your killing of animals by comparing them to plants. As if killing a human was the same as pulling a blade of grass. Conversely, you would deem it permissible to kill and eat humans who are not as self-aware as you are. You don't have to be a friend of someone to not pay for their enslavement and death. Some animals eat meat because they evolved to.

Well, I think you need to work on your basic compassion. Most plants we kill are killed by the animals that we then kill to consume. Less plants have to die if you simply eat the plants. But yes, plants most likely don't have individuated consciousness.

Obviously? Why do we not have a special race of humans that we breed and kill for food?

No, it's not just the pain. I think we shouldn't kill animals for food for the same reasons we shouldn't kill humans for food. It's delicious because it provides nutrients that are not easy to come by otherwise in a natural scenarios.

You have to have some sort of reasonable underlying causal theory for why things are the way they are. We don't randomly feel pain. Pain obviously has an evolutionary function. It's not like these things are just inherent to actions. You don't understand how naive this understanding of experience is. Cutting a human will cause them pain, and then you think because cutting causes pain, therefore cutting any living being will cause pain. But it's not the cutting that causes the pain, but the brain that creates the experience of pain as a result of the cutting, to motivate an individuated consciousness to act a certain way. Also, guess what every animal that humans eat, eats? They all eat plants. cows eat so many grass-blades, or other foods. This is all an absurd argument, given that animal agriculture causes more plant death than agriculture would if we simply ate the plants in the first place.

They will blame the democrats.

But in this case we have an explanation for why that is the case. I'm honestly too lazy to write it all out, but basically you cause a solidfying of identity by attacking them, and by giving no good faith credence and shaming them, you further isolate them making them want to resist against the tides of normalcy. There are more reasons but like I said.

The more you resist, the more it persists.

I had a conversation with someone in relation to consanguinamory rights, and while they agreed that we are violating peoples rights today, they basically said there is nothing we can do about it because in the end the billionaires control everything, and the only reason why LGBT people have rights is because billionares engage in culture wars. Socialist brainrot is a thing as well, sadly.

Finally you guys are waking up, I've been pestering this forum about it for years! The question now is, what exactly do we do about this? It seems like every other issue is meaningless because of how impossible solving anything is in this environment.

That's not even the worst. The bad part is that there is no accountability whatsoever. People don't care if they are sold misinformation, even if you show them that it was blatant misinformation. There is no shame, no need to adjust your epistemic standards so you don't embarass yourself again, because nobody will think it is embarassing in the first place. After all, the other side does it too, is what they think, and therefore we have to protect our own even if sometimes they lie. Like Leo said in the blogpost, people genuinely do not care about truth anymore, even less so now than 10 years ago.

I don't care much about the topic, but I don't think it's unreasonable that aliens might exist and observe us. Most people who are self-proclaimed rationalists do not dismiss the UFO phenomena because they evaluated the genuine possibility or impossibility of such things, but merely engage in peer-pressure driven cultural enforcement. Most human beings are profoundly susceptible to peer pressure. You can test this by looking at the arguments people provide against the phenomenon, like there not being clear footage despite everyone owning a smartphone. It's frustrating that people will literally not think past whatever confirms their biases, because it should be obvious to anyone who used a smartphone that you can't take high quality images of anything that is even moderately far away. I haven't done much research, but given what is reported in the Nimitz encounters, it seems the only reasonable explanation is aliens, or there is some effort to spread falsehood. Epistemically, I find it dubious that most people dismiss that case. If what was reported is true, then in my view the explanation of extraterrestials probably outweighs most other explanations that people like to provide, in terms of likelihood.

I explained to you why the reasoning is laughable. Anything could be the case. Maybe each one of your skin cells suffers when they die. Maybe your liver is having a depression. Maybe different parts of your brain have their own conscious experience. All of these would make more sense than plants feeling pain and fear in response to being uprooted. You are conflating existence with pain. Pain is a very particular substance with a very particular function. To remove substances of mind from their function simply shows how naive your view of consciousness is.

I want to see footage.